The role of culture‐specific schemata in the comprehension and recall of stories∗

Abstract

Experiment I shows that readers write better summaries of stories for which they have an appropriate schema than for stories for which they lack a schema, and that this effect is related to the overall organization of the story and does not lie at the level of single sentences. Raters who judged the quality of the summaries found summaries from stories that corresponded to a familiar story schema more informative than those from stories for which they did not have an appropriate schema, even when the latter accurately summarized the story in question. In Experiment II, sequential recall of a story which deviated in various ways from the subjects’ story schema resulted in poor performance: the stories tended to break up after a chain of five sequential recalls, in contrast to a well‐structured, schema‐based story that was usually recalled quite completely and without serious distortions. It was suggested that a culture‐specific schema aids both in comprehending and reconstructing stories.